SSD vs Rotating Media in a laptop - Mobile 2
Corsair just uploaded a video demonstrating the performance advantages of swapping out the hard drive of a Dell Inspiron laptop with a Corsair Performance Series P128 SSD. To say they was blown away by the experience would be accurate. They upgraded to one of our SSD drives on my home computer and always felt like it was faster after the upgrade, but didn’t do any benchmarks or time the boot speed of my machine before and after, so they never really knew how much faster it really was.

After making this video though, you can sum up the difference a SSD drive makes with one word: impressive. Have a look and you’ll see what they mean.

The results were so impressive, they had to double-check their test. They can’t remember the last time changing one component made such a dramatic difference in the performance of a machine. So, as a sanity check, they swapped the hard drives between the laptops to make sure they didn’t have a faulty system. Nothing changed. The system with the P128 SSD was not just seconds, but minutes faster booting up with these programs installed.

The P128 machine got a 6.7 in the Windows Experience Index while the system with the standard HDD had a hard disk score of 5.7. This doesn’t sound like much of a difference, and actually tells me that you can’t learn everything you need to know about hardware just by looking at benchmarks.